1. The Supreme Court includes nine judges, or justices, who are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate: eight associate justices and a chief justice. That number has remained fixed for many decades, but was historically elastic: The Supreme Court has included as few as five justices on its bench, and Franklin D. Roosevelt famously floated a plan to "pack" the bench with as many as 15 justices.
2. The Supreme Court's term, when it hears arguments and issues opinions, begins on the first Monday of October and ends in late June or early July. No cameras are allowed inside the courtroom, and both the plaintiff and defendant are usually allowed 30 minutes each for oral arguments, though the justices frequently interrupt and redirect the argument with questions, discussion and analysis.
3. A case is decided by the court in private conference, and always pivots on the question of constitutionality, as the court is invested with the final authority to interpret the U.S. Constitution.
If the chief justice is in the majority, he or she will assign the opinion to a justice; otherwise, the senior associate justice in the majority will assign the writing of the opinion. Dissenting judges may sign on to one opinion, as Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito did with Justice Antonin Scalia's dissent in King v. Burwell, or issue individual dissents.
Justices may also reach the same opinion as a majority but dissent on the reasoning, as happened with NFIB v. Sebelius, the court's first major Obamacare ruling, where five justices agreed, or concurred, on the constitutionality — but not why.
Rulings can fragment even further. For example. in its ruling allowing the publication of the Pentagon Papers in the '70s, the court issued only a brief per curiam (unsigned) 6-3 opinion allowing publication, with each justice then filing a seperate opinion which concurred and dissented with one another on many parts of the case.
4. Because the justices are appointed by a president, their jurisprudence, or theories of the law, become inevitably colored in the public conscious, where they are referred to as "Republican" or "Democratic" justices. In practice, however, the justices' positions are less partisan, though not apolitical: It's more accurate to think of the justices as belonging to conservative, moderate or liberal schools of jurisprudence, and often some combination thereof.
For example, Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Republican appointee, has become the court's most prominent defender of the Constitution's right to privacy and equal protection as it applies to same-sex relationships. Observers say this reflects a deeply-held belief about the role of individual liberty.
5. Supreme Court rulings are not initially issued electronically. Journalists, advocates and other onlookers must instead receive the rulings in hard copy and analyze them in the moment.
This process has given rise to both CNN's infamous mistake on the court's first Obamacare ruling (its reporters stopped at an earlier passage in the ruling, which seemed to suggest the law could be struck down, without reading further where the justices nonetheless upheld most of the law) and the "running of the interns."
6. Some of the justices are friends. Indeed, Justices Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsberg, in many ways ideological opposites on the law, have a years-long friendship which is the subject of an opera.
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